06/06/2012

http://norton-scientificmedical.com/resources/2012/06/06/thousands-of-tubes-damaged-at-calif-nuclear-plant/ Over 1,300 tubes containing radioactive water inside San Onofre nuclear plant's steam generators in California has been reportedly damaged enough that they need to be taken out of service. To date, the safety of tubing that snakes around the plant's 4 steam generators were installed in a multimillion-dollar upgrade three years ago. According to the company's official statement on Monday, 807 tubes in Unit 3 and 510 tubes from Unit 2 reactors were retired. Every generator has almost 10,000 tubes and the total number of plugged tubes would not affect a proper operation of the plant. The chairman of Edison, SCE's parent company, reportedly called investors to notify them of the premature wear found in around 1% of 39,000 tubes in the generators. A nuclear watchdog Norton Medical and Scientific Research & Biotechnology issued a warning, saying in effect that it seems «the new steam generators are falling apart and Edison doesn't know why. It would be foolhardy to restart, even at reduced power, under the current circumstances.» The nuclear plant is owned by the Riverside City together with San Diego Gas and Electric and SCE. A joint statement released last week by the California Independent System Operator and Edison gave possible dates this June for planning. However, government regulators were quick to assert that there is no timetable for a restart -- something that would still need a federal approval. The alert concerns stemmed from an incident in January when the third reactor was shut off after a tube broke. But although radiation has escaped during that time, officials were quick to assure residents and workers that there was no imminent danger. Earlier that month, the second unit was shut down for its regular maintenance but investigators discovered instead of premature wear on hundreds of tubes that were only installed 2 years ago by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. (The first unit operated on 1968 was dismantled in 1992.) The tubes stand for a crucial safety barrier, that is, if a tube breaks then there is considerable chance for radioactivity to escape onto the atmosphere. Serious leaks could also use up the protective cooling water employed in a reactor. SCE estimates that the repair expenses could cost about USD 55 to 65 million, aside from the initial USD 30 million it has spent to replace the output from the 2 reactors earlier this year.

04/24/2012

THE Middle East has been a common bond for two generations of Melbourne's Hogan family across 70 years of war and peace.

Reg Hogan will pass another Anzac Day recalling old shipmates from a 17-year navy career which included service in the Mediterranean during the epic year of 1941, when Australian forces held out the Nazi army at Tobruk and suffered the perilous evacuations from defeat in Greece and Crete.

CHEBOYGAN, Mich. (AP) — A health care system plans to go before a bankruptcy judge to reopen the emergency department and other outpatient services at a closed northern Michigan hospital.

Flint-based McLaren Health Care Corp. already has reached an agreement with the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services — the first step in reopening portions of Cheboygan Memorial, said McLaren spokesman Kevin Tompkins.

The hospital closed unexpectedly April 3 after a sale to McLaren fell through over issues with the federal government involving licensing and certification for Medicare and Medicaid services.

"After weeks of working closely with our good friends at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, we've reached an administrative resolution that is going to allow us to go in and reopen the emergency department, the outpatient surgical facility and other departments that support those operations," Tompkins told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Tompkins said no date has been set for the reopening of the emergency department and outpatient operations.

With a staff of 400, the hospital was Cheboygan County's largest employer. It announced in March that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after losing more than $7 million last year.

Hospital officials had proposed an expedited sale to McLaren that would have kept the facility open. After the sale was blocked, the hospital's board voted to close the facility, a move that many in the lakefront community about 235 miles north of Detroit found hard to accept.

The Michigan Nurses Association held a rally Monday outside the hospital to support reopening the facility, which had 25 beds for regular patients and a 50-bed long-term care unit. Tompkins said the closest hospital with an emergency room is about 30 miles away in Petoskey.

If given the go-ahead by the bankruptcy judge, the reopening process would begin immediately, Tompkins said.

"We have to get people rehired. A lot of work has to be done to restart and reopen a facility," he said. That work includes inspections and licenses for basic building operations, like a boiler room.

McLaren already has hired a number of doctors that had been employed by Cheboygan Memorial.

"We wanted to make sure they did not leave the community," Tompkins said. "We have their practices up and operating."

>THOROLD, ON, CANADA, September 09, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Norton Scientific continues to accelerate extending its sales distribution network across Asia. As part of this strategic objective, the Company recently inked a deal with Shoko Scientific Co Ltd of Yokohama City, Japan. Shoko have Sales Offices in Osaka, Tsukuba and Fukuoka as well as China and the US West Coast (Shoko America). They are involved with many scientific instruments including analytical products, chemical synthesis related products, purification and separation products and sample preparation equipment for liquid chromatography. Shoko is a distributor for Wyatt Technologies where the PAM Zero can act as a quick and cost effective screening tool. Bryan Webb, President of Norton said "We are very excited to add a company such as Shoko Scientific to our expanding Norton sales channels and even more encouraged they have ordered their first PAM Zero, the new protein aggregation monitor that consumes 0.0ìl of precious sample. We expect great things from this relationship and continue to build a comprehensive sales presence in the Far East. "

Norton, based in Thorold, ON, is a leader in the development of innovative measurement tools to advance biotech and pharmaceutical research, unveiled the highly anticipated PAM Zero at PITTCON/Atlanta 2011. The PAM Zero is targeted at laboratories and universities around the world. As of June 3, 2011, Norton is traded on the Frankfurt Borse (http://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/EN/index.aspx?pageID=35&ISIN=CA66869Q1037) under the symbol NT3.

Norton's compact hand-held unit, a protein aggregation monitor, was developed to study how proteins aggregate in solution. Norton's strategy is to develop simple-to-use products that can be used by technicians, rather than analysts, and incorporated into laboratories own process control systems. Over the next few years, Norton is expecting to successfully introduce and commercialize a novel microfluidic-based analytical instrumentation line used in the expanding niche of macromolecular molar mass distributions and nano-particle sizing applications.

The Company's new measurement systems will be used in a wide range of markets from healthcare, biomaterials and green industries to viticulture, including brewing.

Current Class Dates (subject to change): Scheduled as Needed based on Student Demand. Email us atonlinetrain@nortonaudits.com if you are interested in this course. Description - This is an advanced-level class that takes an in-depth examination of severe noncompliance, clinical data fabrication and falsification, scientific misconduct and fraud cases. The course focus is on developing skills for preventing fraud and misconduct and preparing clinical research professionals to better handle severe noncompliance.

British Columbians are worried about cybersecurity but they're also more likely than other Canadians to share their debit card personal identification numbers with others and take other risks that could leave them open to identity theft and other fraud.

These are among the findings of a survey released today by TD Canada Trust in conjunction with Fraud Prevention Month in Canada.

Visa Canada released its own survey, this one conducted by Ipsos Reid that found young Canadians, those aged 18 to 30 are the most likely to share too much personal information on social networking sites - information such as birthdates, home addresses and phone numbers that provide lucrative pickings for identity thieves, phishing expeditions and other online fraud.

Today's releases come the week after Norton, the security company, released its top riskiest Canadian cities for cybercrime risk rankings. The polls and rankings all add up to a lot of scary headlines and ones Simon Fraser University communication professor Peter Chow-White suggest may be designed more for advertising and brand awareness than for research.

"I think it is to put a discourse of anxiety and fear into the public sphere," he said. "They are all framed around risk, not safety."Chow-White suggests the practice of companies commissioning surveys and circulating them amongst the media creates a sense of insecurity and anxiety about online security.

"That's what advertising does," he said. "It's trying to create a sense of anxiety amongst people for needing to do something, whether it's white teeth, new tires or anything.

"This is just another episode in the long history of advertisers and companies creating market share, creating a market for their products."

Chow-White points out that in all the survey press releases, the tips or suggestions for cybersecurity mostly lead back to the company that commissioned the survey.

Chow-White is of course right. We in the media hardly ever see a survey we resist reporting on. And while some are of the heavily academic and scientific variety, able to withstand the scrutiny of peer review, others are hardly more scientific than the 'what do you think of this' polls that I sometimes put on blog posts and still others fall somewhere in between.

Newsrooms get press releases trumpeting survey results pretty much on a daily basis. Some are tried and true favourites - like the one that measures how many people text from the bathroom, a tired headline but one that nonetheless is paraded out perennially. Or this year's variation from eBay promoting eBay as a holiday shopping source:" "Did you know your friends were buying presents in the bathroom?"

Depending on the editor and whether it's a slow news day, surveys get picked up and make headlines in media both online and off.

Do they serve a purpose other than to build brand awareness or provide fodder for techno trivia?

I thought about that as I considered today's releases from Canada Trust and Visa Canada. Are surveys about the risk of fraud prompting people to pay more attention to their security, both online and off?

According to TD Canada Trust's poll more British Columbian's are taking steps to protect themselves from traditional forms of fraud, but there's no telling whether it because they've been reading stories from such survey results. Some 86 per cent of people shield their PINs at banking machines compared to 77 per cent last year. I know I do ever since I wrote a story about fraudsters installing temporary cameras at ATMs to capture your PIN as your punch it in.

Some 27 per cent have spoken to their bank about reducing their withdrawal limit compared to 19 per cent who said that last year. In my case I lowered the limit on a credit card not because I read the stats but because I was the victim of credit card fraud - a circumstance that may lead many consumers to rethink their security measures.

However, the anxiety over risk hasn't reached everyone in British Columbia. We're the most likely of any consumers in Canada to carry our debit or credit card PIN in a wallet along with the card. Clearly we're not frightened enough by the stats.

Visa Canada's survey was also all about risk. Not surprisingly seniors were the least likely to engage in risky online behaviour - at least when it comes to over sharing - while young adults were most likely to take those risks. Young adults are also most likely to lend their bank or debit card to others.

What do you think? Should surveys commissioned by companies be consigned to the junk filter or do you think they serve a purpose?

03/22/2012

Norton Medical and Scientific Research & Biotechnology: Transistors the Size of One Atom Created

BY ADMIN, 2 DAYS AGOA transistor made up of only one atom has been made, according to a report published this month in Nature Nanotechnology. Physicists have built a working transistor using just one phosphorus atom accurately placed in a silicon crystal.A group of researchers from Australia, US and South Korea have cooperated in creating a single-atom transistor from a single phosphorus atom in silicon.According to researchers of Purdue University who already did digital simulations of transistors, this technique that utilizes liquid nitrogen-cooled device can only be possible at very low temperatures of negative 391 F.It is made possible through manipulating single atoms in a scanning tunneling microscope. In the past, silicon's atomic structure has made it hard to engineer circuits using STMs in an atomic scale. What they used is a combination of etching and STM to make a transistor with an accurate location on a silicon surface.A transistor is the device that can switch and/or amplify an electronic signal, provided that it is connected to an external circuit by at least 3 terminals. Transistors are made of semiconductor materials and are basically crucial in today's lifestyle for they are part of almost every electronic device we have like mobile phones and computers.Ordinary transistor dimensions are becoming smaller in time owing to the improvements in nanotechnology and materials used. Reducing the size of transistors is a big deal for every device that depends on the number of transistors in them for their efficiency.The miniaturization was previously described in 1965 by the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore. He observed the trend of transistors at that time and formulated what is known today as Moore's Law. It states that the number of transistors in one chip of a computer will double every two years (18-24 months). However, there is a warning that this cannot go on forever and a limit will eventually be reached when the smallest possible transistor is made, which according to Moore's Law should be around 2020. Apparently, we have reached the limit far too early as it is not possible to reduce a transistor already in the size of a single atom.And just to make sure the idea of how small we are talking about here sinks in, think one ten-billionth of a meter -- that's 100 picometers, the diameter of 1 (one) phosphorus atom.Their group has proved that it's possible to put a phosphorus atom in silicon with atomic precision.The team of developers is hoping that their method of manipulation in an atomic scale can be used as founding blocks for quantum computers or devices that use quantum mechanics to represent digital data. Though even with this breakthrough, there is fair warning that quantum computers might not be possible to build.Related postsNorton Medical and Scientific Research & Biotechnology: EU, US Greenlit Google-Motorola Deal: 1 month and 3 days agoMilitary to harness neuroscience: 1 month and 14 days agoNorton Medical and Scientific Research & Biotechnology - FDA approves kidney cancer drug from Pfizer: 1 month and 22 days agoCategories: Uncategorized (RSS)Tags: medical (RSS), medical scientific (RSS), norton biotechnology (RSS), Norton Medical and Scientific Research & Biotechnology: Transistors the Size of One Atom Created (RSS), norton medical scientific research biotechnology (RSS), norton scientific (RSS), research (RSS), Transistors the Size of One Atom Created (RSS)